So long, Rockies, and yo, Phillies!

Things can sure turn around in a hurry in a baseball game, particularly at Coors Field in Denver. As I drove home from work tonight, the Rockies were leading in the top of the 9th with closer Huston Street on the mound. I pulled into the driveway as Jimmy Rollins scratched out a single, then turned the engine and radio off.

By the time I got through with the my arrive-at-home ritual and plopped into the recliner, the Phillies had taken the lead. My jaw dropped as I checked the MLB.com app on my iPhone and saw that the game was still going. A quick flip of the channel and I watched as Brad Lidge recorded the final two outs.

It was amazing how quiet the ballpark got. The Phillies move on to the National League Championship Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers, giving baseball a pair of dynamite bi-coastal matchups. The Yankees and Angels, of course, are in the ALCS. Both series should offer plenty of drama.

In honor of the Phillies, I’ve posted above a photo of myself in my Phillies cap, which I picked up while coaching one of my sons’ Little League teams a few years back. The shot is just old enough so that those 1990s mirrored sunglasses are definitely out of style.

For most of us, it’s ‘Wait Until Next Year’

Playoffs notwithstanding, for most baseball fans today is the first day of the long winter. The season is over, the concession stands are empty, the lockerrooms bare as the players have packed up to go fishing or hunting or whatever they do in the off-season.

For followers of the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Indians, the Kansas City Royals, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the San Francisco Giants, another year has passed without post-season play. We small- and mid-market fans will watch glumly as the Cardinals, Dodgers, Phillies, Rockies, Angels, Red Sox, Yankees and Tigers or Twins stretch their seasons.

For those teams, hope remains for October glory, a pennant, a World Series champagne spray. But for most of us — like this crushed Cubs fan — our refrain is “Wait until next year.”

Spring training can’t come soon enough.

Less than excited about baseball wild card races

We’re in a wild card race. Awesome!!!

Well, hardly. Wild-card races in Major League Baseball have been running for a couple of decades, and I still can’t fully accept them.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take a wild card berth. As I write this post, I’m listening to the Giants and the Dodgers. I want the Giants to sweep LA this weekend as I simultaneously pray for the Colorado Rockies to drop each game in their series with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

But the race for a wild card berth doesn’t nearly get me as excited as someone claiming a league or division title. Way back in the late 60s as baseball contemplated following the NFL into multi-division playoffs, I can remember my father telling me that the playoffs were supposed to be the antidote to the all-too-frequent runaway teams atop the old single-division American and National leagues.

In many years, that vision has come through. But — Yankees and Red Sox fans, don’t hate me — I grow weary of the same teams returning to the playoffs year after year after year. The seemingly endless run of playoff appearances by the Atlanta Braves is a good example. They hoarded playoff appearances, although I must admit my judgment carries the bitter tinge from their only Series victory in recent memory, in 1995 over the Cleveland Indians.

Then there was the ‘97 series, in which the NL wild card team – the Florida Marlins – defeated the Tribe in the series. Where’s the justice in that?

I know I’m fighting the last war by whining about the wild card concept, so let this be my last harangue on the subject. I will now turn my attention back to the Giants, and hope against hope that their stellar pitching and anemic hitting manage to sneak them into the playoffs, on the road to a World Series victory against an AL team that won 20 more games in the regular season.

The Bay Bridge series: Athletics vs. Giants

I’m on vacation for a week, and I celebrated by watching the San Francisco Giants host the Oakland Athletics in their first interleague games of the season.

I wish I had one of those A’s-Giants combo caps that were available during the 1989 Bay Bridge World Series, the one that was interrupted by the Loma Prieta Earthquake.  A good friend back east still has his, but I can’t even find a photo of one. This ersatz Giants’ cap in the A’s green and gold will have to do.

The San Francisco Bay area is the only market where a twin logo cap could exist. In New York, would any fan of either the Yankees or Mets want to share space on the crown with the other team’s NY? No way.

In Chicago, would a Cubs or Sox fan tolerate such? Never.

In LA? Angels and Dodgers together? Inconceivable.

Around San Francisco Bay, fans have fierce allegiance to their team, but it’s a market that appreciates both franchises. I take the twin logo cap as a signal that Bay Area people are true fans of the game, recognizing the value of both the American and National leagues.

(The Giants won tonight on a 3-0 shutout by Tim Lincecum. I was rooting for the Giants.)

Winners and losers at Fenway Park

The Boston Red Sox pulled off another stunning comeback tonight, overcoming a 7-0 deficit to defeat Tampa Bay 8-7. Even if they don’t get to the World Series, the Sox proved they are winners.

The losers tonight? Not the Rays, who are still up 3 games to 2 in the American League championship series. To me, the losers are all the Boston fans who started streaming out of Fenway Park when the Rays went up 7-0. Those wussies who headed for their cars and the “T” don’t deserve to wear a Sox cap.

The ecstasy – and the agony – of September baseball

April is the cruelest month, T.S. Elliott said. But he never had to suffer through September on a baseball club eliminated from playoff contention in August. That’s the plight of the Seattle Mariners, who’ve been left in the dusty cellar of the American League West. As I write this post, the M’s are 30.5 games behind the division-leading Los Angeles Angels.

It reminds me of one terrible season when the Cleveland Indians were eliminated very early from the American League race — probably when they finished eighth in 1967 — and the Cleveland Press ran a sarcastic banner headline: “INDIANS LOSE PENNANT.”

So I feel for the Mariners, the San Diego Padres and the other sad sack franchises whose only taste of playoff excitement will be as a spoiler in late September games against the few lucky teams scratching and clawing for the playoffs.

I should note that I picked up my Mariners cap not when I lived in Seattle but while coaching one of my boys’ Little League teams in the San Francisco Bay area. The hat is a basic snap-plastic adjustable model.

I always chuckle a little when looking at the Mariners color scheme. When the caps were redesigned in the early 90s, the team insisted that the colors were navy blue and, absurdly, Northwest green.

If that bill is green and not teal, then my name is Ken Griffey Jr.